An Introduction to Genetic Statistics

Abstract

Kempthorne's Introduction to Genetic Statistics is an excellent treatment of those aspects of mathematical genetics most pertinent to the plant and animal breeder. The book is divided into two nearly equal parts. The first of these is concerned with problems related to gene segregation at individual loci and includes such topics as the distribution and estimation of gene frequencies under random mating, inbreeding, and various conditions of mutation and selection. The second part of the book is largely concerned with the inheritance of continuous characters, such as height and weight, and with partitioning the variance observed in such traits into genetic and environmental components. The book contains only a brief account of evolutionary genetics and is for this reason unlikely to be of great value to mammalogists, who are more concerned with the evolutionary and ecological consequences of the mendelian mechanism than with applications to plant and animal husbandry. Although the book aims at being completely self-contained for readers with a knowledge of high school algebra, it is probable that the reader with no more mathematical background than this will find much of the book very difficult and some of it wholly inaccessible.